Sunday October 23, 2011 - As mankind continues to wage war upon itself, the poignant and often stark beauty of Benjamin Britten's WAR REQUIEM stands as a reminder of the human side of the great conflicts between governments and religions. Britten dedicated his REQUIEM to the memory of four friends who died during World War II - three of them killed in action and a fourth who subsequently committed suicide. The composer considered the work as secular despite using passages from the Latin Mass for the Dead as part of his libretto; these spiritual texts are meshed with poetry by Wilfred Owen, a British soldier who perished in World War I, one week before the Armistice. His gravestone is shown above.
Britten sets the massive works for three soloists, chorus, boys choir, organ, full orchestra and chamber orchestra. This afternoon these elements combined in a performance of thrilling musical impact while the work itself hits like a sharp blow to both the mind and the spirit. After experiencing such a performance it is inconceivable that any thinking or feeling human being would ever again consider warfare as the solution to anything. But the people who need to hear and ponder this work would have neither the inclination nor the ability to understand it. This is perhaps the saddest commentary on mankind's current state.
But, to the matter at hand: the three vocal soloists:
Ian Bostridge, known (and sometimes disparaged) for his highly individual interpretations of German lieder, was simply magnificent this afternoon. The tall and very slender tenor uses his entire body to project the music and text, unafraid of physical expression to convey the drama of the words. The voice, so clear and so eerily shaded with the colours of despair, regret or consolation, created phrase after phrase of miraculous beauty leaving the resonance of human thought expressed in song lingering on the air. His singing of what is perhaps the most singularly moving passage of the entire work "Move him into the sun"...was heart-rending; and his single utterance in Latin, 'Dona nobis pacem', was the summation of all that the WAR REQUIEM seeks to tell us.
Baritone Simon Keenlyside was an ideal counter-point to Bostridge; Keenlyside's singing - while brimming with subtle inflection - is more straight-forward in delivery, providing an Earthly contrast to the tenor's other-worldly sound. The Keenlyside voice was in robust state, powerful and showing fine dynamic control. In one of the work's most inspired passages, "And lo! an angel called him..." the combined artistry of Bostridge, Keenlyside and the LSO's harpist Bryn Lewis made for a spine-tingling aural experience. Later, when the two vocalists are cast as soldiers from opposing sides dying together in some dark, god-forsaken ditch, the entire fallacy of war comes to a head: they expire together as brothers, murmuring "Let's sleep now..."
Slovenian soprano Sabina Cvilak's was a voice new to me. Her sound is a bit more lyrical than we sometimes hear in this music though she projected well from her perch near the back of the stage. A couple of high-lying entires at first were a trifle hesitant, as if the voice was not entirely ready to co-operate; but soon Ms. Cvilak was singing with radiant confidence. She was particularly impressive in the Sanctus where her voice mingled with Britten's airy ensemble of bells and chimes. The soprano looked striking in a black silhouette gown.
Gianandrea Noseda led the London Symphony Orchestra and the massed choral forces in this deeply satisfying performance; a conductor with such elegant hands, Noseda seemed to summon the music up from very souls of his musicians. He crafted the great span of the work with an ardent feeling for both the overall architecture and for the individual moments where Britten illuminated the message of the work with unique instrumental colours. The LSO's playing, from earth-shattering fortes to moments of crystalline delicacy, was first-rate.
The two choruses - adult and boys choir - created the vibrant tapestries of sound which give the WAR REQUIEM its vocalized humanity. Singing the Latin texts, the voices seemed to be crying out to gods who can no longer hear, or who no longer care. In war, the Individual is sacrificed on the altar of some nationalistic collective "bawling its allegiance to the State"; in the REQUIEM the composer seems to juxtapose these great choral outpourings with the moving simplicity of expression of the individual voice. Although many of his works have a sacred context or source of inspiration, Britten himself largely withdrew from organized religion in the 1930s.
Aside from a single glaring intrusion by a cell-phone, the performance today was experienced in reverential silence. After a long and truly-deserved ovation at the end, audience filed out; it was an older crowd, people who would likely remember World War II and would surely recall Korea and Vietnam. It's the younger generations who are now experiencing today's wars - both declared and simmering - at a safe remove, who need to experience Britten's timeless score and contemplate its message.
"Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved,- still warm,- too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?"
~ Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918)